Chris Christie's NJN Giveaway

WNET has a Koch Brother as a trustee (0.00 / 0)

Here's a quiz:  If you defund NOAA, and get rid of any public broadcasting that could possibly cover climate change or real unbiased science - does that mean climate change isn't happening?

One Vote.  Yours.  It really does matter.

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by: carolh @ Tue Jun 07, 2011 at 00:03:12 AM UTC

Off topic yet... (0.00 / 0)

Just wanted to thank Jeff Tittel and the N.J. Sierra Club for endorsing Chris Daggett and helping Christie get elected.

mmgth

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by: mmgth @ Tue Jun 07, 2011 at 02:49:28 AM UTC

Meh.... (0.00 / 0)

On the one hand, it very well may have been an extra expense we didn't need. On the other hand, they are they ARE keeping NJN TV news, which does provide decent info about news in NJ, and (to quote another very biased brodcast outlet) "not New York, not Philadelphia". I do think that the radio stations, mostly NPR anyway, will do OK under WNYC and WHYY's guidance. I can't attribute this to a war on public broadcasting.  How many states at this point actually HAVE state owned broadcast outlets?  

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by: robusdin @ Tue Jun 07, 2011 at 10:52:06 AM UTC

state-owned, state-operated, state-funded (0.00 / 0)

To clarify: the station is still state-owned.  40 years of taxpayer investment was not given away, yet, but those assets will now be used now by the private group of NJTV and grant monies and towers rentals will go to that group too, and not to the State of NJ evidently.  Of course that money will go the production group too, Caucus.  
Many of the state licensee stations in the US have changed to private stations, but with long slow transitions, or over to state universities and the like.  But in those cases, rarely did the station have the people and infrastructure of an NJN, because they didn't produce much orig local programming; they are just PBS content pass-through stations.  They didn't spend years investing so much taxpayer money into infrastructure like the State of NJ had to for NJN (towers, buildings, a recent huge development campaign to make the digital conversion) and services (NJN News, multiple NJ series, documentaries, educational outreach.)  
Regarding being state-operated ... the staff of NJN (I am one) constantly asked to be a more independent authority, like Turnpike or other autonomous entities.  Though most of us never felt guilty of pandering to a specific Gov, we too wanted out from having to have every job title okayed by the Gov office.  The staff once again asked to be state-funded but not state-operated recently, but that was rebuffed.  We too wanted to shed the easy-to-cite but never proved "perception" of political cloying to the Gov.  (By the way, even if Mr. Adubato Jr. is free of any actual pandering for political purposes, isn't there still a "perception" because of who he is?)
Why can it be construed as a war on public broadcasting?  Because a blue state's Republican Governor can now report to the nation that he has successfully killed taxpayer support for public broadcasting -- not a penny of anyone's taxes going to it.  And he has blue state voters, Dems, and a flagship PBS station CEO right there with him to enable this.  (Rick Scott in Fla. is also zero-ing out any money for PBS there.) It doesn't matter that some kind of "NJTV" survives, on skimpy funding and/or big money from only the biggest private donors and corps -- that money comes with strings too.  It matters that one station in a still fairly wealthy state has decided to zero any public support for public broadcasting -- tv or radio.  You can fault the original set-up of NJN for making us state employees .  But Gov. Christie isn't just stopping state operation; he is ending 40 years of state financial support -- the seed money a not-for-profit public institution needs to have a stable base from which to gather private funds.
If New Jersey state government can zero out its public funding for a PBS station, the reasoning will go, why not all 50 states, and why can't the federal government cut all its funding of CPB, PBS, and NPR?  There's your war on public broadcasting.
Hope this helps.

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by: robosz @ Tue Jun 07, 2011 at 14:50:43 PM UTC

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